Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson

Volumes have been written about George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, but no previous work captures the intimate and vital details the way Inventing a Nation does. Vidal's consummate skill takes you into the minds and private rooms of these great men, illuminating their opinions of one another and their concerns about crafting a workable democracy.

The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

The Last Empire is Gore Vidal's ninth collection of essays in the course of his distinguished literary career. Vidal displays unparalleled range and inimitable style as he offers incisive observations about terrorism, civil liberties, the CIA, Al Gore, Tony Blair, and the Clintons, interwoven with a rich tapestry of personal anecdote, critical insight, and historical detail. Written between the first presidential campaign of Bill Clinton and the electoral crisis of 2000, The Last Empire is a sweeping coda to the still-existing conflicted vision of the American dream.

Amazon Customer says:"Collection a reminder of what patriotism truly is"

Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir

In this extraordinary memoir, Vidal recalls his accomplishments and defeats, discusses the friends and enemies he has made, and contemplates the nature of mortality. In the Navy, Vidal was forced to use point to point navigation whenever compasses failed. It is an apt analogy for his life, which has been filled with triumphs as well as controversies. Vidal has had relationships with innumerable luminaries, including President Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, and Greta Garbo.

Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal

The product of 30 years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini's Empire of Self probes behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal's colorful life to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truth underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well - a virtual who's who of the American Century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Princess Margaret, and the creme de la creme of Hollywood.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

A razor-sharp thinker offers a new understanding of our post-truth world and explains the American instinct to believe in make-believe, from the Pilgrims to P. T. Barnum to Disneyland to zealots of every stripe...to Donald Trump. In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen demonstrates that what's happening in our country today - this strange, post-factual, "fake news" moment we're all living through - is not something entirely new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character and path.

The Russian Revolution: A New History

Historian Sean McMeekin traces the events that ended Romanov rule, ushered the Bolsheviks into power, and introduced communism to the world. Between 1917 and 1922, Russia underwent a complete and irreversible transformation. Taking advantage of the collapse of the Tsarist regime in the middle of World War I, the Bolsheviks staged a hostile takeover of the Russian Imperial Army, promoting mutinies and mass desertions of men in order to fulfill Lenin's program of turning the "imperialist war" into civil war.

In The Unwomanly Face of War, Alexievich chronicles the experiences of the Soviet women who fought on the front lines, on the home front, and in the occupied territories. These women - more than a million in total - were nurses and doctors, pilots, tank drivers, machine-gunners, and snipers. They battled alongside men, and yet, after the victory, their efforts and sacrifices were forgotten.

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail. In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends - growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration - come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty.

The Putin Interviews: Oliver Stone Interviews Vladimir Putin

Supplemented with referential information and culled from more than a dozen interviews with Putin over a two-year period - spanning Stone's first trip to Moscow to meet with NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden to his most recent visit after the election of President Donald Trump - The Putin Interviews is based on what journalists, news organizations, and other world leaders have long coveted: extended, unprecedented access to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

Bringing together Matt Taibbi's most incisive and hilarious work from his "Road Work" column in Rolling Stone, Smells Like Dead Elephants shines an unflinching spotlight on the corruption, dishonesty, and sheer laziness of our leaders.

Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam

By January 1968, despite an influx of half a million American troops, the fighting in Vietnam seemed to be at a stalemate. Yet General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces, announced a new phase of the war in which "the end begins to come into view". The North Vietnamese had different ideas. In mid-1967, the leadership in Hanoi had started planning an offensive intended to win the war in a single stroke.

The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

This is the story of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from the Texas Hill Country. The Path to Power reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and ambition that set LBJ apart. It follows him from the Hill Country to New Deal Washington, from his boyhood through the years of the Depression to his debut as Congressman, his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, at age 31, of the national power for which he hungered.

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

The financial crisis that exploded in 2008 isn’t past but prologue. The stunning rise, fall, and rescue of Wall Street in the bubble-and-bailout era was the coming-out party for the network of looters who sit at the nexus of American political and economic power. The grifter class - made up of the largest players in the financial industry and the politicians who do their bidding - has been growing in power for a generation.

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

The first new collection of essays by Christopher Hitchens since 2004, Arguably offers an indispensable key to understanding the passionate and skeptical spirit of one of our most dazzling writers, widely admired for the clarity of his style, a result of his disciplined and candid thinking. Topics range from ruminations on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men to the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell.

Richard Nixon: The Life

Richard Nixon opens with young navy lieutenant "Nick" Nixon returning from the Pacific and setting his cap at Congress, an idealistic dreamer seeking to build a better world. Yet amid the turns of that now legendary 1946 campaign, Nixon's finer attributes quickly gave way to unapologetic ruthlessness. It is a stunning overture to John A. Farrell's magisterial portrait of a man who embodied postwar American cynicism.

Hitch-22: A Memoir

Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

The election of Donald Trump is a dangerous escalation in a world of cascading crises. Trump's vision - a radical deregulation of the US economy in the interest of corporations, an all-out war on "radical Islamic terrorism", and sweeping aside climate science to unleash a domestic fossil fuel frenzy - will generate wave after wave of crises and shocks to the economy, to national security, to the environment.

The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution

This compellingly written history presents a fresh, new view of the events that led from the first foreign salute to American nationhood in 1776 to the last campaign of the Revolution five years later. It paints a magnificent portrait of General George Washington and recounts in riveting detail the events responsible for the birth of our nation.

Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

Al Franken, Giant of the Senate is a book about an unlikely campaign that had an even more improbable ending: the closest outcome in history and an unprecedented eight-month recount saga, which is pretty funny in retrospect. It's a book about what happens when the nation's foremost progressive satirist gets a chance to serve in the United States Senate and, defying the low expectations of the pundit class, actually turns out to be good at it.

Who Rules the World?

In an incisive, thorough analysis of the current international situation, Noam Chomsky argues that the United States, through its military-first policies and its unstinting devotion to maintaining a world-spanning empire, is both risking catastrophe and wrecking the global commons.

The Naked and the Dead

Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since become part of the American canon. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction created especially for the occasion by Norman Mailer.

And Yet...: Essays

The death of Christopher Hitchens in December 2011 prematurely silenced a voice that was among the most admired of contemporary writers. For more than 40 years, Hitchens delivered to numerous publications on both sides of the Atlantic essays that were astonishingly wide ranging and provocative.

African Kaiser: General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and the Great War in Africa, 1914-1918

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the continent of Africa was a hotbed of international trade, colonialism, and political gamesmanship. So when World War I broke out, the European powers were forced to contend with each other not just in the bloody trenches - but in the treacherous jungle. And it was in that unforgiving land that General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck would make history.

Publisher's Summary

The Golden Age is a vibrant tapestry of American political and cultural life from 1939 to 1954, when the epochal events of World War II and the Cold War transformed America, once and for all, for good or ill, from a republic into an empire. The sharp-eyed and sympathetic witnesses to these events are Caroline Sanford, Washington, D.C., newspaper publisher turned Hollywood pioneer producer-star, and Peter Sanford, her nephew and publisher of the independent intellectual journal The American Idea. They experience at first hand the masterful maneuvers of Franklin Roosevelt to bring a reluctant nation into World War II, and later, the actions of Harry Truman that commit the nation to a decades-long twilight struggle against communism. The locus of these events is Washington, D.C., yet the Hollywood film industry and the cultural centers of New York also play significant parts.

The Golden Age offers up United States history as only Gore Vidal can, with unrivaled penetration, wit, and high drama, allied to a classical view of human fate. It is a supreme entertainment that will also change listeners' understanding of American history and power.

Writers of historical fiction should take notes on Vidal's excellent ability to relate history through snappy dialogue and description that is neither didactic nor pedantic. This is also a fast-paced listen, unlike much historical fiction.

I thought "Golden Age" excellent for its reflection on history/historiography, on America as Empire, and also as a novel in its own right - It seems to be both a modern novel and postmodern at the same time, by a novelist who was a minor actor in the events woven into novel.

One downside to the audiobook: I almost gave up on the listen in the first hours - the narrator seemed to have mastered neither the cadence of Vidal's sentences nor the voices of a couple of the characters, so she seemed to insert herself between listener and novel -- but that resolved by hour three.

Imagine! A novelist warning - in 2000 - about Presidents who trick the American public into supporting an unwanted war - not to mention the military-industrial-entertainment complex's use of drug wars and terrorism to maintain a constant state of mobilization for war - all related in an entertaining story. Vidal manages to relate not only the fictional elements but also the known history in a suspenseful manner.

Not everyone will agree with Vidal's ideas on American history, but he does argue for a view that is widely supported by professional historians.

Gore Vidal, great as always. The reading however, I couldn't get passed the first hour.

What didn’t you like about Anne Twomey’s performance?

The benefit of audiobooks is being able to hear, clearly, not only the tone of a character but also be able to tell the difference between them. Especially when they are supposed to have British accents. Anne apparently CANNOT do a British accent.

I have never found Gore Vidal easy to read, but I do get a lot from his books. Listening wasn't much easier. There is a great deal of valuable information in this book and I am glad I stuck with it. He gives a great view of the Great American Aristocracy that came to an end with WWII.

This is my first Vidal book and by the end I liked it. Vidal does history very well, seeming to get his facts all right while inserting fictional characters, including himself. This story really covers the social scene in Washington D.C. from just before WWII to the late 1950s. What I don't like is the cynical criticism of everything. Political leaders who are populist are portrayed as stupid and in need of visionary and intelligent leadership, while elite leaders are discounted from the population and do things totally in their own interest while fooling everyone else. I don't quite know what the resulting point is. Of course Vidal's point is that America's democracy was lost to a ruling class. This was a great book to follow on after Truman, since the time frame is exactly the same

Gore Vidal wrights with an uncommon elegance. Deep and provocative this book gave me a lot of food for thought I read it along with the Devils chessboard the story about Allen Dullis and between the two I found interesting insights especially in the McCarthyism suppression of the arts while the endowments from wealthy businessman supported those with "the right message". Though this is only mentioned in the periphery. If you are a fan of the new deal and FDR this book delves deep into the personalities and politics involved before and after World War II.

It is difficult to read a novel that consist entirely of dialogue. Even the gifted Vidal could not pull this off in a novel of sublime literary and historical images. However in the end no one ever moves except to go into an office or a dining room or a dining room for sometimes riveting conversation by and about FDR, Truman and the Washington intelligentsia of the late 30's through the early fifties. He is at his best during the 1940 election conventions and, in the end, describing his life in Ravello on the Amalfi Coast. Although disappointing here, Vidal is still one of the best of the 20th Century.

Gore Vidal is known to have an "in" with celebrities, and in this novel he presents a fictional backstage version of U. S. history, as imagined to be told by Hollywood insiders. And this is the crux of my complaint with the novel. First, it's told completely in the form of personal gossip, so it's like eavesdropping for 14 hours. It never breaks away to narrative, or to historically accurate conversation, and for me, that gets very tiresome very fast. Second, most of the characters in the book are non-politicals who are unknown to me, and so their comments and gossip don't mean anything to me. And third, there are a lot of suggestions of military coups and assassinations, various subplots, and wheelings and dealings that almost happened or that might have happened and gone unnoticed - but are these actual "things" or just Vidal's imaginings of what might have been going on?

I got the book thinking it would give me a different insight into the mood and culture of the times, but it's nothing but a string of imagined Hollywood parties. Disappointing.

With diligence I attempted to make it through Gore Vidal's "The Golden Age". The story is slow, drawn out, and written in a way to make every superficial detail seem as though it is of overwhelming importance to the story. I have to confess, I did not make it through the later portions of the book. It is the epitome of a book that you read only because everyone else is.